Fancy owning the chair JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter on and hand-painted herself?

Everyone wants a piece of JK Rowling these days and now you can actually bid on the hand-painted chair she was sitting in when she wrote the first two Harry Potter novels.

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“During her days as an impoverished single mother in Edinburgh, JK Rowling was given a free set of four chairs for her council flat-a social housing unit provided by the British government. This set included a standard 1930’s era oak chair with a replacement burlap seat decorated with a red thistle”, the official listing for the chair explains.

“The latter being one of the more comfortable chairs amongst the bunch, she favoured it to sit in whilst writing the first drafts of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets – the first two books of a seven part series that would become an international phenomenon.”

The seemingly normal piece of furniture was first put up for auction in 2002 in Chair-ish a Child, an auction in aid of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC). And to make it an extra special lot Rowling “used gold, rose, and green paints to transform the chair into a magical piece of literary memorabilia” which includes the name of her own and Harry Potter’s Hogwarts house, Gryffindor.

“My nostalgic side is sad to see it go, but my back isn’t”, Rowling wrote in an accompanying letter, which is still attached to the chair.

It’s since been sold via auction again, fetching £19,555 in 2009, so we can only imagine how many silver sickles and gold galleons it’ll go for this time.

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Bidding opens via Heritage Auctions on 18th March before the official auction on 6th April. Better get drinking your Felix Felicis – you’ll need to win the lottery before then.